This Is Happiness

by Niall Williams

When Christy and I came into the avenue our arrival seemed propitious and we did the thing all men do, we came over for a look into the hole, nodding the tight-lipped nods that masqueraded as expertise.

Capriciously the roof leaked, but the drip missed the bucket, and then the buckets, and then the bathtub, moving around the room in a rain-game familiar to those who’ve experienced the sense of humour of the Almighty when He comes to Faha.

Sometimes a moment pierces so perfectly the shields of our everyday it becomes part of you and enjoys the privilege of being immemorial. I remember it as though it were today. Honestly. I remember the canal of my throat closing, I remember riots breaking out, sea in my ears, sweat on my lip, fish-hooks floating in my eyes, and the reflex that was general and immediate, crawling beneath my skin and birthing in me the archetypal response to great beauty: the overwhelming sense of my own ugliness. I remember.

Once he got going, my grandfather’s way of telling a story was to go pell-mell, throwing Aristotle’s unities of action, place and time into the air and in a tumult let the details tumble down the stairs of his brain and out his mouth.

To conquer both time and reality then, one of the unwritten tenets of the local poetics was that a story must never arrive at the point, or risk conclusion.

pretty soon you get to a place where you’re not sure there’ll be a tomorrow, where you think I better say this now, here, because not only is time no longer on your side, you realise that it never was, that things were passing by faster than you could appreciate, and whole marvels, the quickening green of springtime, the shapeless shaped songs of unseen birds, the rising and falling of white waves, were passing without you noticing.

She got up from studying me and went to the far side of the room where she made a clatter music of pots that in wife-language signalled the deficiencies of her husband and that she alone knew what was required, in this case carrageen moss.

It’s hard not to despise officialdom in all forms. The retreat of human beings behind it diminishes the nature of what we are. I’ve never known a man or woman to be better for the wearing of the uniform. I’ve known them to be different, but not more human.

it occurred to me, in Faha, and places like it, people had been making it up as they went along and making it up out of no rule book but the one they had been born with, that is an innate sense of right and decency, the rough edges of how to live alongside others having been knocked off not by ordinance or decree but by life.

I had that sickening feeling in what they say is your stomach but is in fact your soul.

Because of a kink in human nature, where the new becomes old, people were already asking when this terrible hot weather would pass.

At my grandparents’, a number of the burnished came to make calls on the telephone, and enquired after me, and repeated versions of what they heard had happened, adding details and leaving out others in a living demonstration of how reality was made up. It was a true thing that all incidents in the parish then had an afterlife and were tirelessly reanimated with an interpretative emphasis or edit. It was one of the threads that tied community and whether or not you had heard the story already didn’t matter, you listened to this version and nodded and said, ‘I know,’ and let that knowledge be a comfort between you for a time.

He often looked like he was in mid-sum and realising he had forgotten to carry the one.

A name is a thing of immense power, the saying of it both a summoning and summing up, so that standing on an empty road and sounding it is a kind of conjuring,

The second, that acceptance is surrender, that there’s a place for it but that place is somewhere just before your last breath where you say All right then, I have tried and accept that you have lived and loved as best you could, have pushed against every wall, stood up after every disappointment, and, until that last moment, you shouldn’t accept anything, you should make things better.

‘Because he doesn’t know me. Because I don’t know him. Because we are strangers who know nothing about each other.’ It was a three-part death knell and finished off with the cold truth of: ‘It was several lifetimes ago.’

When you try and lift your mother it’s not the same as lifting another human being. The moment you do it you know you’ll never forget it for the rest of your life. You know there’s no frailty, nakedness, nor tenderness either, quite like this, and know that the moment you have her in your arms the feeling of it is entering you so profoundly that from here on it will form part of the knowledge of your blood and brain and soul too, whether you believe in souls or not.

Maybe the heart-swollen see more. Maybe the world is not the same world when you’re plodding through a pining May-time. Either way, there was a definite flourishing, and that’s a fact.

It was a condensed explanation, but I came to understand him to mean you could stop at, not all, but most of the moments of your life, stop for one heartbeat and, no matter what the state of your head or heart, say This is happiness, because of the simple truth that you were alive to say it. I think of that often. We can all pause right here, raise our heads, take a breath and accept that This is happiness, and the bulky blue figure of Christy cycling across the next life would be waving a big slow hand in the air at all of us coming along behind him.

he played a plaintive music that was like the salt wind singing, utterly strange and familiar, unlike any other music really, an absolute music, uncompromising as a blackthorn, ancient and elemental, and in the air he played was a whole history of the troubled heart, and when I looked at Christy I saw the sorrow in his happiness had made shine his eyes.

who Charlie was was an April sun-shower, a quick and impetuous dazzlement, an untrappable tempered loveliness combined with a liveliness of mind that in those times the gentry called winning.

Ganga never needed to look down, he dropped the hand and scratched and the head was there. It was an arrangement they had, and when it happened here there was complicity in it, as though they’d both discussed the scene beforehand, worked out how it would go,

there are times in a life that pass but retain a gleaming, which means they never die, and the light of them is in you still.

Some of it too was that a shift had taken place inside me. I understood that I would not be marrying Sophie, Charlie or Ronnie Troy, but could love them all the same, and be happy in the misery of that.

I went because grief has to find a home, has to find a place to settle, or the dark wings will overwhelm you and you will fall down in the road.

He had a gift for accepting life, and that included death.

And perhaps because of the complex of emotions I was feeling that evening, and because none of them could find their way into words, the more the musicians played the more it struck me that Irish music was a language of its own, accommodating expression of ecstasy and rapture and lightness and fun as well as sadness and darkness and loss, and that in its rhythms and repetitions was the trace history of humanity thereabouts, going round and round.

Listening to Junior play, a key turned in me and a door opened, just not the one I expected. I knew I could never be a player like that, I lacked that skill and belonging, but knew too that music and story would be part of what I would be.

And so, because, at the end, we all go back to the beginning, because of the enduring example of Christy telling his story down the line to Annie, because after more than sixty years my mind is back in that place among those people from whom I took the lesson of how to be a fully alive human being, I will carry on here, carry on through the electric pulses of this machine to tell the one story we all have, the one we’ve lived.

He himself had the wisdom to know that the thing that came between intention and its execution was life, and that in a place half a century behind the world another ten minutes would be no catastrophe.

Because at that moment I understood that this in miniature was the world, a connective of human feeling, for the most part by far pulsing with the dream of the betterment of the other, and in this was an invisible current that, despite faults and breakdowns, was all the time being restored and switched back on and was running not because of past or future times but because, all times since beginning and to the end, the signal was still on, still pulsing, and still trying to love.